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" I was a public affairs officer. I worked with the media, but I didn't just stay at my desk. I assisted in military duties, travelled around Anbar province, hung out with a wide variety of Marines. "

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" There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that. "

Phil Klay

Writing

Truth

Tradition

" I don't want to act as though my deployment was particularly rough, because it wasn't. I had a very mild deployment; I was a staff officer. "

" You're not supposed to risk your life just for the physical safety of American citizens - you're supposed to risk your life for American ideals as well. "

" It's a professional military. You sign up and agree to allow your countrymen to use your life as they see fit for the next four years. And I think we all should have a greater role in ensuring that we use those lives wisely. "

Phil Klay

You

See

" Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking. "

" Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see. "

" The Iraq I returned from was, in my mind, a fairly simple place. By which I mean it had little relationship to reality. It's only with time and the help of smart, empathetic friends willing to pull through many serious conversations that I've been able to learn more about what I witnessed. "

" I did try to write in Iraq, and I failed. I think you just don't have the brain space for it. "

" The civilian wants to respect what the veteran has gone through. The veteran wants to protect memories that are painful and sacred to him from outside judgment. "

" With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened. "

" Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it. "

" If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family. "

" There's a tendency to look at anybody who joined the military as if they underwrote everything that happened policy-wise. That's not really the case. I have a friend who both protested the Iraq War and joined the military, and ended up serving two deployments in Afghanistan. "

Phil Klay

Serving

War

" The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went. "

" I've certainly thought a lot more about things like tyranny and patriotism and violence. I think I found some kind of clarity - definitely a thicker understanding. "

" A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book. "

" I ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer. "

Phil Klay

Going

Summer

" Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative. "

Phil Klay

School

High School

" People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable. "

" People should be able to tell stories that are important to them to try and understand what they mean. I don't think you figure anything out on your own. Certainly not war stories. "

" After the fighting is done, and even when it's still happening, apologies are often needed for the recounting of bare facts. Sometimes bare facts feel unpatriotic. "

" In the Marine Corps, you meet this really broad segment of the country; you're working with people from all kinds of backgrounds. And it exposes you to the American military, particularly the American military at war. "

" Though I continue to tell stories about Iraq, I sometimes fear this makes me a fraud. I feel guilty about the sorrow I feel because I know it is manufactured, and I feel guilty about the sorrow I do not feel because it is owed, it is the barest beginnings of what is owed to the fallen. "

" I think that just because you've been through an experience doesn't make you the ultimate arbiter of what it means. We figure things out; we work things out through the help of other people who can engage with us but also be intelligently critical. "

" When I was in Marine training I memorised 'The Waste Land,' which was a significant experience in terms of really breaking apart language and thinking about how the different voices in that poem function. "

" For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home. "

Phil Klay

Than

" A lot of the great pieces of journalism from Iraq showed how important command influence was in violent, aggressive environments, where Marines and soldiers had a constrained set of choices to make in sudden moments. "

" There's something odd about working 24/7, being consumed with everything that's happening in Iraq, and then coming back to the country that ordered you over there only to realize that a lot of Americans are not really paying attention. "

" In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it. "

" I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love. "